Web Hosting Services Defined

If you desire to set up a website and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more stable hosting solution than that. If you wish to develop an actual web site, however, which will be accessible to multiple people and you desire to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable web hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your website?

When you have a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most appropriate way to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your website. So, to launch your site, you need your own domain and a web hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an Information Technology pro and know how to tackle a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to exercise complete control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, though, is that you will need to guarantee the uptime of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting supplier

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance tasks, the best solution is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The hosting servers are held in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant website availability.

Types of hosting services

The Internet is an endless sea and there are a multitude of web hosting suppliers providing various hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The hosting services range from cost-free web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what hosting type fits your requirements?

If you own a small or average-size web page that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that lots of shared hosting users and websites are hosted on the very same web server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts normally involve CPU, RAM, bandwidth and web hosting server storage space usage quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the server do not intervene with each other and do not use more resources than they are allotted.

In case your site is bigger, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are assigned to each individual VPS, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to shift to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is used just by you for your very own website needs. No one else uses its system resources and you get complete root access, can select the hardware in advance, add upgrades later on and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your hosting provider

If you know what your site is going to include, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to select a hosting solutions provider. The most logical step to take is to discover a web hosting plans provider that supplies an immense variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to change web hosting providers in case you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to migrate to a private virtual hosting server solution or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, offer affordably priced shared web hosting plans, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS server web hosting packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server packages. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced private virtual web server hosting plans and dedicated hosting server packages include a free domain name reseller account and billing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the excellent round-the-clock client support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, of course, find other hosting vendors depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by examining different web hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, however, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have web servers in America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer numerous domain name extensions for registration.